In a week’s time, England’s trip to India will be officially underway. With plenty of talk about ‘reverse sweeps as forward defences’ and turning pitches, one big question remains. What are England viewing as a success?
Off the bat, I’m sure many of you view it pretty plainly. A success for England would be to win the series. This time round there will be no tongue-in-cheek talk of ‘moral victories’, only a win is a win. Over five Tests, the only thing to be celebrated is a series victory.
Whilst I understand this in a very straightforward sense, you have to take into account the almost uniquely difficult nature of playing away to India. India have not lost a Test series at home since England’s 2012 win, and in that period have only lost a handful of individual Tests. This is an incredibly hard place to prevail, so success of some kind can still exist within an overall defeat.
On their last visit, England won the First Test and then slumped to a 3-1 series defeat. If we are looking to establish a baseline, it has to be this. A clear success for England would be to better their result from 2021. Such an ask is fair when you consider the overall messaging attached to the current England team.
A popular view is that the 2021 team was an England side running out of ideas and becoming increasingly reliant on Joe Root’s supreme talent. In contrast, the 2024 side is fresh. This is a side with plenty of players who make match-winning knocks, with a much higher sense of positivity around the team.
However, it may not be as simple as this. As ever, cricket is a game of conditions. For one, the pitches might play entirely differently to those from three years ago. In 2021, the pitches for the first two Tests offered plenty of support for batting. Both saw big first innings runs, with conditions getting more difficult as play goes on. If, as is highly speculated, the pitches this time favour spin from early on, it gets harder to make a direct comparison.
Thus, maybe the definition of success will require more than an exercise of just counting up wins and losses. In a format where games can last five days, there is more than one kind of 5-0 series loss. If such a scoreline happens and England get trampled each game, then it feels pretty uncontroversial to call their efforts a failure. But if each game is well-contested, it might be possible to have a bit of sympathy for them.
Most likely is that England’s definition of success will relate to them being competitive across all 5 Tests. They might lose, they’ll certainly have bad sessions, but they will want to make sure that they make India work for it. A major criticism of them in 2021 was the way in which they just seemed to fold as the series went on. If England can put their best foot forward for their entire visit, then they may very well view it as a sign of improvement.
Of course, they could always win 5-0.
